“What about Janice?”
“He didn’t say a name like Janice.” He scratched the heavy, oily hair, licked his lips, and looked at the container. “I really took twenty. Before, I mean.”
I pulled the container closer. I wanted him unconscious when I left, but not dead. Too loaded to use the phone, too straight to die. “And have you? Killed the other people in the chain, I mean?”
“No. You guys were first.”
“And you missed us.”
He said again, “My hand shook.”
We sat and looked at each other, or rather I looked at him and he looked past me as though I were a pile of dirty clothes. He said, softly, “Ohhhhhhhhh,” and his eyes widened in what looked like appreciation. “Fast,” he said. “Haven’t eaten.”
“Since when?”
He looked at me as though I’d asked him a trick question. “Yesterday?”
“You really did twenty before?”
“Thirty,” he said, the lie as thin and transparent as air.
Someone knocked on the door.
I pulled the Glock out again and used it to wave him down although he’d made no move to get up. His eyes were on the white plastic pill container. I picked it up and went to the door, pills in one hand and gun in the other.
“Who’s there?”
A high voice said, “Me.”
I looked back at Bones and his mouth widened again. “Behave,” I said to him. I put the pills in my pocket, shifted my gun into my left hand, undid the chain, and opened the door.
The tallest of the girls stood there, backed up by three boys and the littlest kid, the one who had called Bones El Monstro. They all looked pretty jacked up, wide-eyed and skittish, but they were there, bless them, knocking on the door that had closed behind God-knew-who so he could do God-knew-what to their money source.
I said, “Hey,” and they said nothing. “We’re just talking, just friends, amigos, huh?” I pulled the door further open so they could see Bones on the couch. “See? Say ‘Hi,’ Bones.”
Bones raised one hand and waved slowly, as though he was under water.
I had a sudden idea. “Do you guys know he’s not eating?” I asked them.
The second-larger boy said, “He don’ eat never,” in accented English.
“Well, he needs to eat. Once in a while, bring him something if you’ve got extra, okay?”
“Did you?” This was the big girl, and her tone was accusing. “Did you bring him something?”
“Yes,” I said. “A bag of candy. You bring him something later, okay?”
She looked from Bones to me and back again. “Okay,” she said. She added, meaningfully, “We’ll come back.” She turned to go and the others trotted behind in a herd, the setting sun gleaming off the dark hair on their round heads.
I closed the door. “When you were little, how did the kids at school know you were sick?”
“Because of these,” he said, pointing an index finger in the general direction of his eyes. “And because I moved so careful. Anybody could tell.”
“The blue in the eyes—is that the disease?”
“Sure.”
“Must have been tough.”
“Not after I got the knife. And then the gun.”
His speech was a little on the furry side, and he was sitting about ten degrees left of vertical, so the pills were obviously making themselves at home. I sat down again, opened the jar, and shook out eight more. “You said twenty, right?”
“Thirty,” he said. He looked at the pill bottle and said, “A jar, a jar is one hundred. Enough to take them all the way out. I never had enough to take them all the way out.”
“Well, we’ll see how good you are,” I said. “Maybe this will be Christmas.” I put the eight capsules on the table, and he snatched them up and popped them with surprising precision. I said, “You didn’t kill anyone else.”
“Killed a lot of people,” he said.
“But not this week.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Not anyone in Malibu.”
He stuck his tongue out to reveal two capsules glued to it. He pulled them off between his fingers and then separated the two shells of one capsule and poured the white powder onto his tongue. He was popping open the other one when I repeated, “Not anyone in Malibu.”
“No,” he said, his mouth white at the corners.
“You ever hear of a guy named Herbie Mott?”
“Don’t know.” He let his head loll back against the wall. “Not good with names.”
“Handkerchief Harrison?”
He laughed exactly once, a low sound like “Hungh,” and said, “Funny name.”
“He was a funny guy,” I said. Bones’s eyes drifted closed.
“When did Wattles tell you to kill the people in the chain?”
Bones said, “Huh?”
I reached over and patted the back of his skeletal wrist, and he snatched his hands back and his eyes snapped open, although they were trained on a spot four or five feet above my head. I raised a hand and brought it down slowly, and his eyes followed it. When he was looking approximately at me, I repeated the question.
“Today?” he said.
“You shot at us last night.”
“Then,” he said, and his eyes started to close again, but he fought them open again. “Then yesterday.” He squinted at me and shook his head as much as his fused neck would allow, and said, “You leaving the ’bows?”
“Yes.”
“ ’Kay. ’At’s good.”
“Did he call you? Wattles, did he call you?”
“No.” He started to slide slowly to the left.
“Then how did he tell you—”
“His house,” Bones said. He was lying on his left side now, both feet still on the floor. “Girl called me. Said to go to his house.” His eyes closed so heavily I knew he wouldn’t open them again for quite a while.
The girl, I thought, was my sweetheart Janice. I sat there for about ten minutes, listening to him snore. He hiccupped a couple of times, and I waited to see whether anything would come up, but his system seemed to be accepting the shovelful of Tuinal. I got up and went into his kitchen.
I was standing there, trying to choose a course of action, when he said, quite clearly, “Brazil.” I jumped a little and looked over at him, wondering what fragment of Brazil his consciousness had snagged on, and kind of hoping it was magazine-bright, warm, full of color, and child-free. His mouth was wide open and he was snoring again. One stiff arm had slid off the couch, and his hand was palm-up on the soft carpet, open and vulnerable.
What to do? I worked myself through several theoretical ethical positions quite quickly and when I was finished, I couldn’t think of a single really serious objection to letting him kill himself. He’d said himself that he’d like to take the rainbows all the way out, and if that meant what I thought it meant, I didn’t see many reasons to interfere. It wasn’t like he was doing anything except killing people and poisoning himself.
And then there were the other people to think about, the unknown others he’d kill if I took the rainbows with me and left him there to sleep it off. Keeping them in mind, I went to the sink and took some paper towels off the roll that was standing beside it. I wrapped my right hand in them, and used that hand to turn on the water. With my left, I grabbed another wad of towels, got them wet, and squeezed out the excess moisture. Then I toured the apartment, wet-wiping everything I had touched, and by the time I’d finished doing that, I’d decided on a course of action.
I wiped the bottle of Tuinal and shoved it into the pocket of Bones’s awful black pants, where he’d feel it as soon as he was sentient, or close to sentient. I gave it a farewell pat and picked up the paper bag, into which I jammed all the paper towels I’d used. Covering my hand with my shirt, I turned on every light in the apartment.
When I pulled up the lid of Bones’s right eye, the eyeball barely moved. But he kept snoring and his pulse was strong, so I tucked t
he gun inside my shirt, unlocked the front door, and left it wide open behind me, carrying the full paper bag exactly as I’d carried it in. If anyone was looking, I’d arrived with something and now I was leaving with it. It was dusk outside, shading into dark, and the bright rectangle of Bones’s open door plus their promise to bring him food would, I was pretty sure, draw the kids, and they’d find Bones alive, or at least today’s version of alive. He’d probably kill himself in the next twenty-four hours, but not right after five children saw me go into his apartment.
Even as I struggled with the emotional aftermath of my decision, that seemed to have quite a bit to recommend it.
Despite all of Monty’s fancy algorithms, in the end it came down to simple subtraction. It was really just a question of who was left. The fact that the victim of Wattles’s hit had turned out to be a gambler iced it, even before Anime called me with the name I’d asked for. And the name tied the final knot.
But as neat and final as the knot was, the puzzle it solved comprised only one part of the problem. Wattles was the other part, and since Bones’s apartment was near Paramount, the shortest route to Herbie’s killer took me right past Wattles’s house in Benedict Canyon.
Of course, Benedict was at a crawl at that time of night, a little before seven, jammed with all the people who work on the LA side of the hill and sleep in the Valley. The sun was about thirty minutes down, and between the hills, as I inched northward up the canyon, I caught glimpses of the red glow in the west, punctuated by the silver gleam of Venus as it followed the sun down.
Wattles had never been a friend, but I’d never really thought of him as an enemy, either, and I supposed I’d been right about that since he hadn’t specifically told Bones to kill me. Still, it was hard to work up much sympathy for him at this stage, and I couldn’t think of a reason to bother trying. This whole thing had to come to an end.
I pulled past his driveway and made the next right, about fifty yards downhill. Most of the houses here were tucked behind gates and invisible from the street, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t see me; security cameras sat on the fences, pointed at the members of the hoi polloi who were misguided enough to pay a call. I was stopping on this street precisely because there was a camera just like these above Wattles’s gates.
But I knew something Wattles had no idea I knew. I’d trailed Janice to his house the second time she’d hired me on his behalf because I like to know whose money I’m taking and where to find him or her if it turns out to be a setup. I’d driven past the house as the gates opened to admit her and then parked around the corner, pretty much where I was now, and about ten minutes later I’d learned that Wattles put a little too much trust in the steepness of the hill on which his house sat. The fence on either side of the gate went only about twenty feet up before it gave way to a ficus hedge, dense and scratchy, but permeable to someone who doesn’t mind getting all scraped up and tearing his clothes.
There was a lot of poison oak up there, and it was getting too dark to be comfortable about spotting it, but I couldn’t use a penlight, since I had no idea who might be on the lookout. This was a bad beginning, since I’m highly allergic to poison oak. But after a few moments standing about six feet up the hill from the street, just out of sight of the traffic, my allergies became an academic question because I heard a shot.
The shot put me in an interesting position. I very much doubted that Wattles had just committed suicide; it was impossible for me to imagine him feeling either the guilt or the fear that might lead him to put the gun barrel in his mouth. That left four alternatives: a) someone had done it for him, and he was dead; b) someone had tried to do it for him, and he was alive; c) he had tried to do it for someone else, and the other person was dead; or d) he had tried, etc., and the other person was alive. Alternatives b) and d) would make themselves apparent in a moment, I figured, because there would be at least one more shot.
And there it was. Or, rather, there they were: one, followed closely by another one. This actually complicated my position, rather than simplifying it, since the way things were turning out, it seemed likely that I’d wind up finishing off the survivor, if there was one. It’s one thing not to have, as Herbie sometimes said, a dog in the fight. It’s quite another thing to be cheering for both dogs to lose.
Nevertheless, I ran up the hill, through clumps of stuff that bore a disconcerting resemblance, in the dark, to poison oak. I tripped once and went facedown in the center of one of those clumps, but I was immediately up and running again, as much to get away from it as to arrive anywhere in particular, since I had no illusions about my ability to make a difference in what was happening at Wattles’s house. Even if, by some miracle, I burst upon the scene at the moment when a decisive and survivable act on my part would make all the difference in the outcome, I wasn’t sure I was actually up to choosing a side, much less going all heroic.
The hedge bristled at me, spiky-looking and dead black, since all the light was behind it, pouring through the big windows of what was, if I remembered correctly, Wattles’s dining room. My face and hands weren’t covered against all the sharpness in that tangle, so I pulled on the food-service gloves, stretched my sleeves down over my hands, and used my forearms to force a head-high path through the hedge. It made a lot of noise and seemed to take a long time, but eventually I was through it. For a moment, after the darkness of the climb, I had to squint against the light through the big window, so it took a few heartbeats before the window’s surface resolved itself into a Jackson Pollack abstract: frantic, kinetic drips and splashes of color, and the color was all red. My eyes went to the one identifiable form, a scarlet handprint in the lower right corner.
Instinct shoved judgment aside and sent me running for the door, but then it banged outward and Dippy Thurston was propelled through it, as though shot from a gun. She was wide-eyed and screaming and splattered from head to toe with blood, even her hair clumped and clotted with it, and when she saw me she came at me at a run, her arms spread as though she expected me to pick her up and carry her away, but instead I waited till the very last moment, stepped to the side, stuck out a foot, and shoved at the small of her back. Dippy went down, hard.
She’d had the breath knocked out of her, but she started to roll over, so I stepped onto the center of her back and put my gun against her neck. I said, “Don’t move.”
“Junior,” she panted. “He’s—he’s trying to kill me. He’s right behind—”
“I’ll take my chances,” I said. It took me less than five seconds to find the little Barbie gun sticking out of the pocket of her jeans. She kicked out at me, and I put all my weight on the foot in the middle of her back and stepped over her, leaving her legs thrashing empty pavement.
I put my own gun back under my shirt and stuck Dippy’s into her ear. “Is Wattles dead?”
She stopped moving. After a moment, she began to cry, big gulping sobs. “I don’t know,” she said. “You have to help me. He’s crazy, he just went crazy trying to kill me.”
I pulled the gun away but kept my weight on her back, and sniffed the barrel. “How many shots did you fire?”
“Two.” She sniffled. “Can I get up?”
“Is he dead?”
“I think he’s in there, waiting to kill me. He probably saw you. He’ll—he’ll shoot us both.”
“Whose blood is all over the window?”
She said nothing, and her body went still.
“Whose blood is on you?”
“Please,” she said. “You’re hurting me.”
I said, “Good. Where’s your fat friend?”
“I don’t know who you—”
“The guy you pretended to kick out of your house the day I was there. The one who searched Herbie’s place this morning.”
She said, “Herbie? I don’t—”
“The one who held Herbie’s arms still while you poured boiling water into those gloves.”
For a long moment, I thought she wouldn’t answer.
Then, in a completely different voice, a voice as calm as the one that tells you to be careful stepping onto a moving sidewalk, she said, “He’s at home.”
I pivoted around so I could keep my eyes on the windows. “What’s his name again?”
“Frank. Frank Lissandro.”
“Your boyfriend? Husband?”
She said nothing. No one seemed to be moving inside the house, but there was a lot of blood on the dining room window, and I supposed there could be someone crouching there, looking at me without my being able to see him. I said, “Frank’s at home?”
“That’s what I just said. You have my gun, you have your gun. Let me up.”
“Who was Willie Estes to you, other than your uncle?”
“How do you know—?”
“He was a card shark, and a card shark is just a close-up magician with a deck of cards. Your name, Thurston, is obviously a stage name; Thurston the Great is most magicians’ favorite magician, even if he did work more than a century ago. So I had someone look up your real name and then your mom’s maiden name, and there it was, Estes. As I said, who was he to you?”
A long sigh. I prodded her with the gun barrel, and she said, “Everything.”
I said, “It would take very little provocation for me to shoot you through the head right now. Explain to me why I shouldn’t.”
“Get your damn foot off my back.”
“Austin Willie, right? That’s the first time I’ve heard the Texas in your voice.”
“So? It took me long enough to get rid of it.”
I looked around. We were in the parking area, black asphalt ringed by rose bushes, about six feet from the hedge I’d come through. Wattles’s 1980s white Rolls Royce was parked next to the dining room door. In the carport, up the hill about twenty yards to our left, was what seemed to be a vintage Cadillac, maybe 1967, all gleaming tail fins. The moon was up, but not so bright that it dimmed the light that was streaming through the bloody dining room window. The light seemed to be confined mostly to the dining room, though; the light leaking through the windows in the living room, to my right, was pale and washed out. At a guess, I put the house, low and white, at about 6,000 square feet. The prospect of searching it for old Frank wasn’t very appealing.
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